[gaze]

I think that's the datacenter with the gas turbine generators that operate without permits because they're "portable." Data centers have tremendous externalities but colossus is a particularly nasty offender, and not just due its size.

Edit: They did it with Colossus and now they're doing the exact same thing with Colossus2. https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...

[robwwilliams]

The newer location is about 3 miles southwest of the Memphis Airport (MEM), one of the world’s largest cargo airports and the center of FedEx operations (500 take-off and landings per day most concentrated in a 6 h FedEx window with lots of engines running on ramps and that produces about 2000 tons of NOx per year).

I live about 18 miles downwind of the new Colossus sites, the airport, and lots of truck logistics sites, and a large refinery.

I definitely will be getting 2x exposure to ozone and particulates from both Colossi when they are running full bore. Plus an extra dose of ultrafine particulate with my morning fresh air.

Yes, wouldn’t it be nice to be in Nashville instead with HCA, Oracle, many insurance and financial institutions, and the joy of country music.

As an avid Opus user I am in an ethical Nimby bind. We do need almost any investments we can get in Shelby County TN. I’ll take Anthropic in preference to Grok NOx. And it will be my NOx.

[bob1029]

The biggest issue with the interim onsite generation is the lack of meaningful stack height on the generating units.

Airplanes by virtue of their mode of operation stay out of the unhappy regime most of the time. Also, engines at/near idle produde orders of magnitude less emissions. Those aeroderivative generators are running at full capacity 24/7.

Dumping exhaust at ground level continuously is probably much worse than the airport. Even if it's a FedEx world hub.

[superloika]

Cattle can't choose how to be slaughtered, though.

[vasco]

> I’ll take Anthropic in preference to Grok NOx

It's the same datacenter? Ran by the same people?

[hawaiianbrah]

I think that was the joke.

[Melatonic]

Hey Siri - can you please order this guy a spare set of lungs ?

[swader999]

Or upgrade their Tesla to that bio hazard filtration level

[monster_truck]

Your math is way wrong. The airport is and will be far, far worse. You didn't even mention all of the lead

[robwwilliams]

What was the specific mathematical or factual error? It is not theoretical for me.

[schmookeeg]

there is no lead in jet fuel.

i would expect close to no 100LL burning planes use MEM.

[Kelteseth]

So for a guy that literally has a company that produces batteries and solar panels, choose to use gas turbines. So much for saving the planet.

[renticulous]

He is building the skill tree in such a way that he is prioritising speed rather than environment.

[_heimdall]

Solar and batteries are a bad choice for a constant 24/7 load.

That's the exact reason we will never go fully solar (or wind) unless an insanely impressive battery breakthrough makes storage effectively free while using only common, renewable components rather than rare earths.

Solar, wind, etc are excellent parts of an energy system, but its nearly impossible to cover base load at scale with generation that may only run for 0-5 hours a day.

edit: typo

[jtr1]

You may want to update your priors [1][2][3]

1. https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-solar-panels-and-...

2. https://www.fastcompany.com/91500104/google-minnesota-data-c...

3. https://www.rootsanalysis.com/sodium-ion-battery-market

[irq-1]

https://www.fastcompany.com/91500104/google-minnesota-data-c...

> The new plant in Minnesota will be big enough to deliver 300 megawatts of power and store an enormous 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, making it the largest battery by capacity that’s been announced so far. By comparison, that’s more storage than all of the battery projects built in the U.S. in 2024 added together.

[_heimdall]

That's to power a single data center though, how would that scale?

If I'm doing the math right, Minnesota used 65.7 TWh of power last year so to store 3 days worth of power just for that one city we would need a battery 18x larger than the one mentioned here.

I can't imagine we could ever scale such storage capacity for all energy use, let alone all the wind and solar required to fill it.

[_heimdall]

Sodium is an interesting chemistry, though it has different voltage curves than lithium ion once hardware is built to match it they may scale well for industrial use.

That still doesn't avoid the more fundamental math of having to store such massive amounts of energy though, even if you skip batteries and pump water to retention ponds uphill.

Even for small scale residential, the recommendation is to store 3 days worth of average usage to handle stretches of cloudy days and to have a generator for the times when that still doesn't cut it. You also need enough solar that 4-6 hours of generation can fill those batteries back up after a stretch of cloudy days.

You also have to contend with frequency issues. This is what took down Spain's grid, they had turned on a ton of solar at the time - with many gas plants offline a seemingly small dip below 60Hz really wrecks much of the system when it wasn't designed to handle those swings and triggers multiple safety mechanisms.

[tiagod]

The Iberian blackout resulted from a way deeper and more complex reasons than your comment implies, and does not yet have a complete explanation.

The "inertia" issues already have solutions being used in production (in Australia, for example).

[_heimdall]

Oh it was extremely complex and I didn't intend to imply that the full explanation would fit in a single HN comment.

The inertia problem you mention wasn't solved in Spain though, and whether it can be solved or already is elsewhere is irrelevant here.

[rdtsc]

> So for a guy that literally has a company that produces batteries and solar panels, choose to use gas turbines

“Sorry, we have to shut down your database because it’s been overcast for the last two days”

Now, they could have a mix, of course, but just running on solar and batteries at that power is not realistic.

[hemul3n]

I dug into this topic in some detail on my blog and it's both enraging and depressing.

https://poiesic.com/posts/pattern-recognition

[Torn]

This is a really great watch from Benn Jordan on the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo

Some wild things happening with those, and infrasound. Colossus is shown 4 mins in

[usef-]

This was debunked: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...

[krige]

The debunk is extremely sketchy on many points.

https://www.bearlythinking.com/p/andy-masley-doesnt-understa...

[usef-]

That post is mentioned at the bottom of what I linked.

He has a full post response here: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/to-be-clear-i-do-understand-ho...

[tristor]

Interesting, I read this series of posts and as someone who does not have a dog in this fight but does have a more than passing background in both audio engineering and datacenter engineering, the response Masley gives here to the very first criticism is fundamentally incorrect. I haven't read the rest of this, but his claim about sound intensity what it would imply about energy is on its face untrue.

When you take a measurement of a sound, you are measuring both its pressure and its intensity, that is what is implied by a measurement in decibels. The measurement is taken from the point of the measurement device/listener in relation to the source/generator. If the measured value is potentially harmful, there is no such implication about needing to redirect additional energy to make it harmful, it's already been measured as potentially harmful at the point of measurement.

It's basically nonsense. My most charitable interpretation of his very first responsive argument is he's saying that a datacenter would need to intentionally direct energy towards increasing the intensity of its sound output to make Jordan's original measurements meaningful. That's neither how measurement works, nor how sound works, nor even how datacenters work. Things like sound and heat are BYPRODUCTS and not the point of the datacenter, both have an intensity, and that intensity is measurable, and any energy which is expended towards that intensity is energy that was wasted away from doing computations.

I stopped reading after this. I don't know if Masley is out of his element or just practicing motivated reasoning and thinks his readers are stupid. Either way, his rebuttal already failed on the first point.

[zenapollo]

How i know Masley is trash:

> Jordan is suspiciously lurching to the extremely high energy end of the light spectrum when we know that the low energy end (comparable to infrasound) doesn’t have negative impacts on us if we can’t detect its presence.

Masley spouts the falsifiable propaganda that any photon (light/emf) below ionizing radiation energy can only cause “heat” and can have no other possible harm effects.

Many science-minded people (though more accurately in this case, billiard-world materialists) have become quite militant defenders of this idea (ostensibly fighting off the hoardes of tinfoil hatters and quantum aquarians sensitive to 5g).

This point is very plausible military industrial propaganda. There were numerous studies with evidence (starting from the 60s) such as - non ionizing radiation (eg hv powerlines) might cause lots of cancer, and it’s weaponized (sub-thermal) usage can microwave the brains of enemy spies. THOSE studies have come out in declassified and leaked docs.

Now we have several plausible and serious theories of mechanism for low-f light disrupting biology that lean into quantum biology. While the iceberg of quantum biology understanding is still in its early decades, the mounting downstream evidence of health and medical issues are established public knowledge.

[HDThoreaun]

I dont know, Id say the enraging thing is that the government is so incompetent and unable to expand electricity supply that datacenters are forced into using loopholes to get power the only way they can.

[hvb2]

> Id say the enraging thing is that the government is so incompetent and unable to expand electricity supply

So let's say you're a homebuilder, if I tell you I want a new home and I want to live there tomorrow, you can all of a sudden build it in a day, right?

Electricity use is skyrocketing for various reasons, these datacenters being one of them. There are a lot of countries struggling to keep up with demand. So incompetence? No, probably more like supply lagging demand.

Or ASML and Nvidia and all also are incompetent, because they didn't see demand coming....

[ZeroGravitas]

In the early days of this the AI companies were asking for massive new energy supplies but also refusing to sign contracts to pay for it over the decades of its life.

They're basically attempting to game the system, politically and economically, to put as much of the cost on taxpayers and ratepayers as they can. This naturally slows things down.

[HDThoreaun]

ASML and Nvidia did see the demand coming. Intel didnt, theyre incompetent.

> There are a lot of countries struggling to keep up with demand. So incompetence?

Mostly, yea. If the government gets out of the way there are plenty of people who would be happy to supply power in exchange for money. The homebuilding analogy is good because homebuilding in the US often has the same issues that plague the electricity market. There's no reason it should take years to build homes in many parts of this country, but it does.

[fragmede]

If only there was some sort of planning, by a central authority!

[_heimdall]

That isn't a problem of inept government, its a problem of over regulation and what amount to state-sponsored monopolies in many areas.

We don't need the government to fix it by expanding power grids from the top down, we need free markets allowing competition.

[_heimdall]

I'd be curious to hear from the silent down votes. Do you disagree that power companies are effectively regional monopolies? Or do you disagree that government oversight and regulation isn't the reason for poor maintenance and lack of capacity?

[skywhopper]

These are the same companies and individuals who are actively working to destroy functional government, and are happily looting the US treasury rather than let it be spent on things such as encouraging more energy production.

[georgemcbay]

Yup, and now Anthropic is complicit in the environmental damage and health problems for local residents that these data centers are causing.

But hey, number must go up, right?

[idle_zealot]

Have you considered that the march of progress requires human blood to grease the gears and mulched skulls to pave the (highly efficient) road? Really, when you take into account all of the future lives this will improve and save it's difficult to claim any cost now is too high. Would you stand in their way and delay the day that Mythos cures cancer?

This is a joke. Read it in a mocking tone.

[projektfu]

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

[BobbyTables2]

I wonder what percentage of GDP expenditure will give us SkyNet.

Undoubtedly, it will find cures to all cancers… The ARR and stock appreciation will be amazing. Except the cures will be found long after it has wiped out all humans.

[tadfisher]

Wiping out all humans _is_ the cure.

[thelastgallon]

Not Anthropic, but Sam Altman - AI will solve climate change and cure all diseases.

[coliveira]

AI is the new religion, and one needs to be stupid to believe it.

[ChicknNuggt]

Already so many people are treating it as a higher being, believing whatever that comes out of it

[fragmede]

That implies you don't need to be stupid to believe the other ones.

[_heimdall]

My favorite claims are that it will solve both aging and death, whatever that means.

[LogicFailsMe]

I'm not saying human blood and mulched skulls are a renewable source of power, I'm just saying. Or maybe they can partner with SoulCycle to power computation with 24/7 spin classes?

[kennywinker]

And people called the matrix’s human batteries far-fetched.

[ericd]

Always felt like it would've made more sense if it was using part of the peoples' brains to do their computation, as super energy efficient computers.

[tadfisher]

I believe that was in the original script, and rewritten after some exec didn't understand how brains could be computers.

[louiereederson]

Per sanguinem ad astra

[Johnny_Bonk]

I loled

[morkalork]

When do we start building pyramids and doing the Sardaukar blood letting ritual?

[hugh-avherald]

When the 10-year yield hits 6%. Basic macroeconomics.

[broknbottle]

Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice that I am willing to make.

[Nition]

A superintelligent AI will be safe though, because it learnt its morality from us.

[ChicknNuggt]

Doesnt AI learning its morality from humans makes it unsafe, I mean just look at some cases, humans dont exactly always have good morals

[Nition]

Yeah, look at the parent comment I was sarcastically responding to.

Of course top of all that, even if human morals were perfect, it's still a dubious claim.

[shimman]

Do you think Boris cares about people getting cancer and dying from these data centers? No, he cares about becoming rich as fuck.

[coliveira]

This is simply called disruption. They really don't care.

[chinathrow]

Isn't he rich already by now?

[shimman]

Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are already billionaires. That doesn't stop those greedy fucks from stealing everything in their path in the pursuit of money.

Greed is a societal illness.

[jquery]

Given how much our EPA has been gutted by the current administration, I don’t think relief is very likely.

[stronglikedan]

Seems like selc's time would be better spent trying to close the loophole that allows for unpermitted turbine generators instead of going after one company for doing what they were allowed to do when they did it.

[tootie]

And Anthropic can pay money to Musk to absorb all that liability while they keep training models.

[SilverElfin]

So much for Dario’s ethics. He happily partners with Elon. He seems like just another power hungry monopoly seeking liar.

[chrisldgk]

That’s because he is. None of these people are your friends and all of them will fuck you over if it means getting richer and more powerful.

[znpy]

> So much for Dario’s ethics. He happily partners with Elon. He seems like just another power hungry monopoly seeking liar.

Dario has been glorified unnecessarily. He's just like all the other people in the space: not good, not bad.

And keep in mind that when Dario was opposing AI usage by the US State he wasn't really opposing, he was just saying "not yet".

[bvcp]

this is why ai in space will win

[_heimdall]

The physics of data centers in space will be extremely difficult and expensive to pull off in any meaningful timeline.

I fully expect "space AI" to be about as realistic as the flying cars and hover boards we've been promised since televisions were black and white.

[bvcp]

its only a expensive to viable alternatives, is there a viable alternative for 1 terrawatt of compute on earth? how could you get approvals for such a project

[_heimdall]

The alternative would be just not building it.

I'm not sold that a data center in space is even possible unless and until we develop a drastically different solution for heat management.

[nelox]

xAI’s turbines produce meaningful local/regional pollution (especially NOx in a vulnerable area) but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.

[palmotea]

> xAI’s turbines produce meaningful local/regional pollution (especially NOx in a vulnerable area) but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.

If you shoot someone in the face, it will produce a meaningful increase in local/regional murder, but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.

[techpression]

Gave me a chuckle on my commute, thanks!

[renticulous]

No one should drive any kind of vehicle because they cause accidents.

[palmotea]

> No one should drive any kind of vehicle because they cause accidents.

Come on, stop with the desperate false equivalencies.

[cududa]

It doesn’t matter if people have to suddenly live by gas turbines that run 24/7 because why again? Can you repeat that last part back to me but say it a little dumber for me?

[glaslong]

farting in a crowded elevator because the people outside the elevator won't even notice

[throwaw12]

multiply rounding errors by thousands and you get somewhat meaningful impact. you are underestimating the scale of independently small pollutions

[redox99]

What's the tremendous externality of gas generators? People heat their own homes with natural gas and it's no big deal. How can a datacenter that is miles away be worse than that?

[coliveira]

How can something that is a million times bigger than your home be any different, right?

[m4rtink]

Its totally inefficient - burning the same gas in a co-generation plant, ideally combined with district heating, would produce the same amount of pollution and basically make use of all the energy.

[jLaForest]

The gas furnace in my basement don't have a massive jet turbine emiting high frequency noise

[alex_duf]

It's the low frequencies that's more of an issue apparently. Benn Jordan has a great series of videos about it, including one on Colossus

[redox99]

I wouldn't call noise pollution a "tremendous externality". The gas turbines should just be placed far enough from where people live.

[ben_w]

Should, but in fact are too close.

[redox99]

It's not a tremendous externality. It only affects a very small group that lives nearby.

A tremendous externality was leaded gas that was everywhere.